“A UTC is not a school or a college, it is a hybrid animal,” he said in an interview in May.

“Ofsted takes no account of employability in inspections and that is a big test for us.”

However, a spokesperson for the watchdog rejected these claims.

“Inspectors take into account the destinations of UTC pupils, but as we set out in our handbook, no single measure determines the outcome of an inspection,” he said.

Ofsted inspects UTCs as schools “because that is the legal status they have”, and all schools are inspected against the same criteria.

“Clearly some UTCs manage to meet these requirements,” he added.

In the same FE Week interview, Lord Baker hit out at schools that refused to comply with their legal requirement to open their doors to technical and vocational education providers, including UTCs – as set out in the Baker clause amendment to the Technical and FE Act.

And in an interview with The Times newspaper in 2017, he blamed “poor governance and mistakes made” where UTCs had failed.

Thus far, 10 of the 36 UTCs inspected by Ofsted, or 28 per cent, have received a grade 4 verdict.

A further 13 have been rated “requires improvement”, meaning a massive 64 per cent are rated less than good.

And to date eight UTCs have closed after failing to attract enough pupils, owing in large part to the difficulty in persuading them to change schools at 14.

David Russell, the chief executive of the Education and Training Foundation who formerly led on vocational education reform at the Department for Education, took to Twitter to vent his anger at the latest reports.

“This was the 100 per cent inevitable outcome of UTCs’ policy, as many inside DfE said at the time,” he tweeted.

Leaders and governors at the school, which also opened in 2015, were deemed “ineffective”, having missed “significant” teaching weaknesses, according to inspectors.

“Teaching has been weak and consequently, students have made very poor progress,” the report said, adding that the top team had failed to recognise these failings until exam results were released in August 2017.

However, Ofsted acknowledged that the school’s new interim principal, Ruth Umerah, was starting to turn things around.

Leaders and governors at Derby Manufacturing UTC drew criticism for their “over-generous” view of quality, which “prevented leaders and governors from taking appropriate action to secure the required improvements”, according to the June 28 Ofsted report.

Feedback

Iron pyrite

How many failures are required before it becomes blindingly obvious that UTCs are and always have been a flawed concept.? Whining that ofsted isn’t fair or that UTCs are special is pathetic. Time to shut them all down and stop wasting money on a failed experiment. Duff idea, poorly implemented at great expense

Phil Hatton

UTCs would do worse if they were inspected with the same methodology as a GFE or SFC. Is the school sector better than the learning and skills sector? No. The huge number of outstanding schools does not reflect the reality of the numbers not achieving their English and maths to an adequate level and the questions of employers on why those who do achieve the grades cannot write a letter or make basic calculations. When the previous Chief Inspector praised them you knew what was coming, and it has. A good idea poorly implemented and unwanted by schools who influence views of parents. What is criminal is the wonderful resources that are being underutilised.